Why specialist publishers win with Steam's new cross-promo rules!

Also: some cool data from Stream Hatchet & Broken Arms, and lots of discovery news.

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Back for another week in the game discovery coal mines, folks - although this intro is mainly an excuse for us to pretend to be Devo. And maybe - given the generally uncertain times - we all need a little excuse for levity around here.

Talking of which, much kudos to Maximum Entertainment for partnering with ‘squirrel influencers’ to use real-live squirrels (and a gun) in their Steam launch livestream for Squirrel With A Gun. (We don’t condone guns, but we like squirrels.)

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Analysis: Steam’s good volte-face on crosspromo!

Wasn’t it only on August 15th that we had a big newsletter about Steam’s cross-promotion changes, explaining that “starting in early September, all links and crosslinks in game descriptions are being nuked”, including some prominent cross-promo capsules being used by publishers. (Sometimes confused for ‘real’ Steam UI…)

None of that is changing, but Valve - after talking to a lot of devs about what was being lost by being too restrictive - have revealed a new set of features to add cross-promotion on the Steam platform. As they note:

“Now developers can control which developer, publisher, or franchise is highlighted below each game’s written description. These controls will let creators specify the set of games to draw from, as well as the sort order for those games, and set one or more of the included games to force to the front of the list.”

We’ve screenshotted this feature on the Hooded Horse-published Xenonauts 2 (above), for example. It’s basically another copy of the ‘More Like This’ recommender, but for the publisher, dev or franchise your game is in. Valve also just - post-facto - added a little ‘follow’ button for the publisher, which is great.

So if you look on the Xenonauts 2 page, for example, which is well-optimized, the publisher now has:

• A ‘check out the whole Hooded Horse franchise’ mini-link near the top, linking to more strategy games.

• Two bundles, including the Hooded Horse Publisher bundle, directly below the link to buy, making it easy to see other games they publish.

• The ‘more from Hooded Horse’ link we screenshotted above, which goes to the franchise page we already linked.

It’s not quite as ‘forward’ as it was before for publishers - some of which were spamming multiple ‘calls for action’ for different games, before you even got a chance to read about the game whose page you were on!

Who this shift really helps - in our view - is specialist publishers in certain genres, or devs who iterate on the same game style or franchise. You can team up with other developers or publishers in the ‘bundles’ section of the Steam store page, but your games need to be directly linked in Steam’s database to do the ‘franchise’ promo.

This approach disadvantages publishers like PlayWay who sometimes use a host of companies with different names to put out their games, due mainly to part-ownership stakes, etc. (And it disadvantages small devs who may have a lack of titles to promo.)

There’s also a bonus - also very helpful feature - “the ability for developers to highlight one item of DLC at the top of the DLC list [on a specific Steam page] in a bigger way”, with a flag such as “New","Recommended", "Coming Soon", "Player Favorite", or "Recommended For New Players". So again - more dev/pub-controlled curation rolling out.

Two final comments on this. First, this was a good compromise rolled out swiftly, and shows the advantage of a flat, cabal-like structure at Valve for platform development. And second: most of the comments on the announce from smaller devs are still around Discords not being linkable in the ‘main’ Steam page area.

There’s a potential compromise here, too. You could pick one of your social media sidebar links to be featured above the main description with custom text, for example. But Discord is ‘off-platform’ for Steam, and Valve is trying to clear out the top of Steam pages to be way more uniform and buying-focused. So… maybe not?

Aug 2024’s most-watched streams: usual, but not

We’re back with another edition of ‘oh yep, I guess these historically popular games are still popular’, aka our monthly collab with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from basically all the major (non-China) game streaming platforms.

But seriously, we love this data because a) it reminds us that these evergreens stay evergreen because they keep getting played and watched, and b) the full ‘Top 100’ for August (Google doc) that Stream Hatchet exclusively provides us has great insight on exceptions, as follows:

• Apex Legends surges, as Black Myth debuts in the Top 10 most-watched: two bigger movers in the Top 10 (above) most-watched - Apex Legends had a new ‘Shockwave’ season launch which sent hours watched up 85% to 50.9m (#8), and Black Myth: Wukong did an impressive (non-China!) 41.7m hours at #10.

• Valve’s Deadlock and TiMi’s Delta Force lead beta interest in August: neither are formally released, but Valve’s own shooter/MOBA hybrid beta Deadlock - which hit 170k CCU today - had 11.2 million hours (#31) watched in August, and TiMi’s alpha of its franchise reboot of Delta Force hit 10.5m hours (#34).

• Brand new releases? Star Wars Outlaws, Crime Scene Cleaner are notable: looking at non-GaaS debuts, Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws (#55, 5.1m hours) and Playway’s Crime Scene Cleaner (#71, 3.3m hours) both did well. (Budget difference between the two is hilarious, but Outlaws launched very late in the month.)

There’s a lot of other potential takeaways from the full list, including decent beta performances from Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Arena Breakout: Infinite, and the just-launching Spectre Divide, but we spotted an interesting outlier - Lockdown Protocol.

This first-person social deduction game launched in late July and has had a semi-viral increase to ~8,000 Steam CCU over the past few weeks, leading to 3.1 million hours watched (!) for a #73 ranking - pretty impressive going.

There’s a trend of lower-budget - but clever, well-done - social games breaking out. For example,somebody in our GameDiscoverCo Plus Discord also noted that Dale & Dawson Stationery Supplies (The Office meets social deduction!?) is also trending towards 5k Steam CCU straight after launch. Maybe we’ll see it in these charts soon?

Hundred Arms: inside the road to 100k paid copies

For those with an excellent memory, we last covered Broken Arms’ winemaking simulator Hundred Days back in 2021, when we revealed it sold around 12,500 units in its first 2-3 weeks on sale.

Now, via a post from Broken Arms co-founder Yves Hohler, he explains: “Since its release on May 13, 2021, Hundred Days… has sold over 100,000 copies across all platforms. We have self-published the game, with the exception of the mobile versions (Android & iOS), where we partnered with Pixmain.” (They are now self-publishing on mobile.)

We appreciate long-term data points like this, because you can really see what a good long-term job Broken Arms made - above - of revenue across many platforms on the game. (The above chart is “net income after store fees and refunds”, by the way.)

What’s more, we got a breakdown from Yves of total revenue across all platforms - and we were surprised to see that Steam was ‘only’ 54%. Looking into it more, we realized that smart platform deals powered a lot of this, since the game:

• Got payments based on playtime in Google Stadia Pro.

• Is currently part of PlayStation Plus Extra’s Game Catalog on PS4/PS5.

So if you were to deconstruct actual paid units outside of subs, looks like it’s probably Steam (>50%), followed by Switch, with all of the other platforms (Xbox, PlayStation outside of Game Catalog, the cheaper iOS & Android versions, Itch, GOG) being minor contributors.

Still, the ‘long tail’ if you are a small studio is good across all platforms - ~25,000 Euros net in a month, multiple times in the last 12 months. Hundred Days is niche, but good & doesn’t have much competition. So the revenue just keeps on coming…

[UPDATE: Broken Arms notes that subscription-related royalties were included in the above breakdown, but things like the $ from Epic’s free games week were not.]

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

2024’s PC vs. console vs. mobile game revenue split, per Aldora.io.

Finishing things up here - we’ve got some video game discovery links to compile and throw wantonly at you, as follows:

• Following last week’s newsletter on Concord, IGN put out its Concord piece featuring us and analysts galore. Pre-launch awareness was limited, per Circana’s PlayerPulse. But how do you even scale awareness in today’s fragmented media landscape? [UPDATE: oh, Concord is getting pulled from the marketplace entirely, to “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”]

• We’re not a mobile game newsletter, but knowing the top mobile games for August 2024 is contextually useful: Western titles Royal Match, Roblox, Monopoly Go! and Candy Crush Saga dominate there, with Honor Of Kings & Dungeon Fighter Online winning Asia. (And Whiteout Survival is a worldwide hit.)

• Joost van Dreunen’s new outfit Aldora has one of those giant ‘2024 and onwards’ game market sizing pieces, also summed up by GameDevReports: “In 2025, people will spend $250.2 billion on interactive entertainment (+4.6% YoY).” But they’re forecasting console hardware down another 11%, after a 31% dip in 2024.

• This interview with ID@Xbox’s Chris Charla talks about discoverability from the platform perspective, and also shouts out Isao Murayama as the regional rep who landed Palworld as a Game Pass Day 1 title, a big coup: “he’s a huge fan of Craftopia and Pocketpair, and worked really hard to help them bring Palworld to Xbox.”

• Larian’s Michael Douse has been saying things on the Internet again, singling out the “artificiality of pricing structures” in Star Wars Outlaws’ deluxe package, adding: “Almost all games should cost more at a base level because the cost of making them (inflation, for one) is outpacing pricing trends. But I don’t think we’ll get there with DLC promises so much as quality & communication”, semi-joking: “Everyone’s just waiting for GTA6 to do it.”

• Every now and again, Valve grabs multiple game devs for internal projects, and members of Risk Of Rain creators Hopoo Games are the latest: “co-founders Duncan Drummond and Paul Morse - ‘alongside many other talented [Hopoo devs]’ - will be working on game development for the Half-Life and Counter-Strike studio.”

• Another good piece from Paul Kilduff-Taylor, ’game development is not a lottery’: “No, gamedevs should not be out here mortgaging their houses… or ruining their mental health for the sake of video games, but do we really want a culture in the games industry that shrugs and says ‘well, your efforts don't mean anything anyway as it's all just luck’?”

• Here’s new info on mobile game subscription service Halfbrick+, from the Fruit Ninja folks, now onboarding third-party iOS/Android titles to share a $3.6m rev pool: “Halfbrick+ has 600k MAU, and has generated 11m game downloads to date. It has a 2% conversion rate to paid plans, and gets around 30k organic downloads daily.”

• An interesting quote from controversial film director Harmony Korine on his old industry: “Why we’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively is because they’re losing a lot of the most creative minds to gaming and to streaming… all those kids who are so creative are now just going to find other pathways.” [via Garbage Day.]

• Microlinks: upcoming Game Pass titles in early Sept. include Age Of Mythology: Retold, Riders Republic, Expeditions: A MudRunner Game & more; Discord's activity tracker now tells everyone just how long you've been playing; pre-teens (10 to 12 year olds) can now use Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR app.

Finally, you may be aware of stand-up comedian and YouTube vignette-r Alasdair Beckett-King from his ‘every single Scandinavian crime drama’ video, which is.. perfect. But his new video satirizing videogame NPCs reminded us that he recently made a micro-satire of ‘every indie game’ which nails the ‘boutique indie’ experience. Enjoy:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]